Thoughtless Existence
by bronzillium
Summary: Quiet, plain, simple. That's all she's ever been. Except over time her cowardice morphs into something paralyzing and it's all she can do to wonder why she never saw the world differently sooner.


**I thought perhaps I would shed a different light on a character we don't see too often, whom I happen to love dearly and I've found is often misinterpreted. Hopefully I've captured her well.**

**Enjoy~**

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Everyone knows about that one quiet kid. The one that sat alone at lunch, worked on everything alone, couldn't contribute to group work (or didn't really try to), never talked to anyone, and always seemed a bit _off_. We've all encountered more than one throughout our lives, and they will always be there. Watching, silently. Because that's what they do best. Notice everything everyone else overlooks, pay attention to the tiny insignificant things that actually define everything humanity is built upon.

It _is_ what she does best.

It's always been her special little quirk, other than being absolutely horrendous at everything else life threw at her. She could sit in a corner of the room, or on a bench in a crowded public place, and just watch everything happen around her. She would notice things others wouldn't pick up on; the way a father channeled his anger into how he held his phone, the small hint of perfume almost completely drowned out by cologne on the lapel of a schoolteacher's shirt, or the gashes hiding under a young girls coat sleeves. She could listen in on any conversation without ever being called out for it; simple chats with store clerks, calls to upset lovers miles away, sometimes clandestine exchanges between people who weren't ever supposed to meet. She would just absorb the details of her environment; inhale bits and pieces but never exhale a thing.

There wasn't really anything to do with all those tiny things she gathered, though; none of it served a proper purpose other than generic back-room gossip and scandal, something she wasn't too keen on participating in (not that anyone spared her more than a glance or even bothered to invite her into the din). But it was very fun to play with and manipulate. She was good with that too. Manipulating what she saw and heard and knew. She could cut people's love lives into neat little strips, mix them up, weave them together, and make her own soap operas. She could throw an adulteress or a missing heir in just for fun. Or maybe plot a kidnapping between accomplices that had never actually met in the daylight hours that existed outside of her head. Sometimes she would stage elaborate murder mysteries, or suspense stories involving espionage and double-crossing spies disguising themselves as the next-door neighbor or that quiet old man who likes to feed the pigeons in the park around the corner. Whatever it was, she always had a movie playing in her mind staring the strangers sipping cappuccinos at her favourite café, perhaps the doctors that tended to the living she would run across in the elevator, too.

At one point in her life she had considered writing out the epic sagas that rolled through her mind when there was no one to talk to (which was always), but she'd thought better of it. Who would bother reading them? She didn't have friends of any sort, and she hadn't spoken to her family in years. Besides, wasn't it some sort of infringement on the private lives of the people she based her silly little stories on?

_No, no._ These were just for her and her patients to keep busy as the long work hours rolled by.

She never had to worry about anyone judging her for watching and building on what caught her interest this way either. Corpses didn't poke fun at her for reciting dramatic battles of love and conquest aloud while she worked to unravel the stories they themselves kept secret. They couldn't penalise her for thinking that that one business man in the ritzy suit might make a great secret agent sent to oversee the transport of an alien princess from the hospital to a secret containment facility outside of London. In fact, they never really commented on anything. They couldn't, could they? Dead people don't talk back, as much as you may want them to. And perhaps it was a bit odd (incredibly strange) that she wanted them to talk back. That she wanted the gunshot victim and terminally ill not-survivor that lay next to each other on cold metal slabs to sit up and chat about important plot points and character development in her latest installment about a dapper gentleman turned serial killer.

Every time she caught herself desperately wishing they really could for once, she shook her head, blamed it all on her persistent loneliness, and immersed herself deeply in her growing piles of corpses and autopsy reports. Then she would fall back into her usual routine of working questionably late, going home to her tiny one-room flat, and laying on the couch with the thrum of the heater filling her silent home while Toby pawed at her hand demanding to be pampered.

It was a nice life, she thought, for that one quiet kid. Unobtrusive, simple, basic. The definition of her existence.

Yet often times, as sleep dragged her eyelids lower over her eyes, she questioned where she'd gone wrong. She knows there are marvelous inhuman creatures out there that do the exact same thing she does, that were pegged with the same label at one point or another, but who surpass her one defining ability and actually get recognized for it by the rest of society. She knows where to find them, she's loved and fawned after more than one throughout her slow uneventful life (only to be ignored multiple times). She knows she could have been like that, if only she had trained herself to see the right things. To see the unmistakable hands of a killer in a passing stranger instead of knowing that she likes to sew, to see the malicious intent of a thief in the creases in his eyes instead of knowing he needs new glasses, or at least being able to see right through even the most elegantly woven lies.

But she couldn't do any of that and wouldn't even know how to go about learning.

So (boring, ordinary, plain, dull, dry, stale) Molly Hooper, with self-pity nestled in her belly and her cat in her arms, in her lifeless shell of a home, would turn off the telly and drag her heavy feet to bed wishing she was someplace else; exactly what her make-believe stories and vivid dreams offered.

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**Can't really say how long this will end up being, but I am certain that the next chapter will be around soon.**

**Reviews would be appreciated. Thank you for reading!**


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